New Delhi, Feb 17 : Aarogya-Doctor on Wheels, a first-of-its-kind Artificial Intelligence (AI) driven free mobile telemedicine clinic has attended to nearly 13,000 remote patients from Udhampur-Kathua-Doda Lok Sabha constituency in Jammu and Kashmir, said Union Minister for Science and Technology Jitendra Singh on Saturday.

Inspired by the Digital Health Mission and Ayushman Bharat, the first super-speciality mobile hospital is providing doorstep consultation with doctors and has helped bridge the urban and rural divide in preventive healthcare, said Singh.

The Union Minister said that the mobile telemedicine service is the first healthcare service that is delivered via digital mode, and is purely from non-government sources by two startup groups belonging to North India and South India.

Aarogya-Doctor on Wheels functions on the latest methodology wherein a patient can narrate his illness or complaint in his native language and the AI Doctor understands the language and responds to the patient in the same language, said Singh.

At the clinic, the patient is also screened thoroughly, investigated and then the consultation is obtained from the concerned super-specialist doctor in one of the leading hospitals in metros like Hyderabad and Bengaluru.

This entire exercise of patient examination and providing a prescription is accomplished in around 45 minutes which may otherwise take several days if the patient has to physically go to the hospital, Singh said, noting that it is also done free of cost through the funds raised from voluntary sources.

"The majority of beneficiaries of the 'Doctor on Wheels' initiative are women," said Singh, stating that out of a total of 11,431 beneficiaries in Doda, Hiranagar and Kathua -Billawar areas, 6,643 were women.

The mobile clinic currently in the fourth phase from January 17, in remote Dudu Basantgarh in the upper reaches of Ramnagar block of district Udhampur, is seeing a similar trend. As many as 835 women have, so far, availed consultation out of a total of 1,452 beneficiaries in 56 villages under 22 Panchayats, the minister said.

Singh, who represents the Udhampur parliamentary constituency that also covers Kathua and Doda districts, said, the first phase of this facility covered more than 60 villages in the far-flung Gandoh area of district Doda where it spent three months.

The second phase was conducted along the Zero Line villages of the International Border, and the third phase was held in the upper reaches of Bilawar.

Singh said the free telemedicine facility overcomes the problems of 'accessibility, availability and affordability'.

For the convenience of patients, the prescribed medicines are also being provided free of cost and in addition, medicine kits containing commonly used drugs are being distributed across the constituency free of cost to all the families in general, Singh informed.

/IANS